Chris Hadfield first dreamed of flight in Windsor

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield poses for a photo during his time aboard the International Space Station. Hadfield will be a special guest of the WSO's opening pops concerts on Oct. 17-19. (Courtesy of Chris Hadfield)

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In a way, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s life in space launched from Windsor.

Now his career will get a rocket-sized boost in another direction, courtesy of the Windsor Symphony Orchestra.

The 55-year-old Sarnia-born astronaut’s Windsor milestones include: the time as a toddler when he saw his first air show here; and next weekend when he joins the WSO for the world’s first concert of music written in space.

“The links between myself and aviation and history started in Windsor,” Hadfield told The Star by phone recently. “I remember sitting with my dad and my brother on the grass near Windsor Airport when I was three or four, watching the Canadian acrobatic team at the time, which were the

So the seed of flight was planted in his head that day. He would go on to become a military fighter-jet pilot and Canada’s most famous astronaut — a social media sensation between December 2012 and March 2013 when he served as the first Canadian commander of the

Besides his high-profile space odyssey, he has also dazzled audiences in air shows, here and elsewhere. And he flew the same plane that transfixed him as a youngster, the F-86 Sabre, at Windsor Airport on his 50th birthday.

Now he’s zooming toward musical history by playing guitar and singing songs he composed in space with earthlings, his son Evan and brother Dave.

“It’s weird co-writing a song while one of you isn’t on Earth,” Hadfield said. “We were sending files back and forth. It was great.”

The collaboration with the WSO, by the way, actually started via email with conductor Robert Franz when Hadfield was still orbiting the planet every 92 minutes.

. He has shot 45,000 images of our blue globe in three space flights, starting in 1995 and spanning almost six months total orbit time — despite that micromanaging NASA PhDs schedule an astronaut’s day down to five-minute increments.

Still, he gazed upon glorious scenery day in, day out, sometimes with camera in hand. It was quite the story to tell. His first book, a memoir called An Astronaut’s Guide To Life on Earth, was published in 2013 and has already been translated into 14 languages. His next book, You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes, is a collection of his favourite 150 pictures to be published next week.

The cover of Chris Hadfield’s book shows Windsor and the Detroit River.

For the cover of the new book, he made Windsor-Detroit the cover model, with a faraway snap that makes the turquoise Detroit River cutting through grey surroundings look as much like art as geography.

“The beauty of that shot is it shows geologic history, but it also shows how we have settled into two countries,” Hadfield said. “There are different histories of Windsor and Detroit.

“But I just want to take people on a trip around the world with me, and show how all seven billion of us are in this together.”

Hadfield’s masterwork, however, comprises photos, music and stories, WSO-style. His wife Helene will also perform.

“It’s an amazing collaboration of science and reality and art,” Hadfield said. “It’s not just the music that’s the world premiere. It’s the imagery of it. Audiences will get to see the environment the music was written in and written for. And then I’ll have a chance to talk about it, too.”

Hadfield, who started playing music as a kid, figures art and technology blend into one.

“There is no defining line between between science and music,” he said. “It’s all just who I am — and who we are.”

Hadfield famously morphed art and science when he spent a Saturday afternoon at the space station filming the first music video ever shot in space, a cover of David Bowie’s Space Oddity. Though the official version, edited by his son Evan, is temporarily off the Internet while legal issues are resolved, the Hadfield version has racked up more than 100 million hits in various versions.

As a trombonist and guitarist, Hadfield has played with orchestras before. When he worked in Houston he played with the symphony there. But the Windsor gig has been more than a year in the making, has already attracted interest from other symphonies, and represents perhaps his creative tour de force — something he hopes to blast off with in the future.

“I’m happy for the audience,” said Hadfield, who considers flying like Superman the most wonderful thing about space travel. “But I’m mostly just happy to be doing this, to be able to put all this together as a complete expression of what it’s really like to leave Earth and live on a spaceship.

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